Trinity College was founded by Queen Elizabeth when she undertook the task of Anglicizing Ireland, and it has remained to our own day one of the strongholds of the conquering race. It is only since the year 1873 that the chairs and offices of this University have been accessible to Roman Catholics. Up to that time they were exclusively reserved for Anglicans, and Mr. Matthew Arnold would exclaim with good reason that such a state of things was the most scandalous in Europe. In France, he said, Protestant masters occupied all the chairs to which their merits entitled them; in Germany, Catholic professors taught history or philosophy at Bonn and elsewhere; while, in Catholic Ireland, the one University the country possessed remained closed during two centuries to all students that were not of the Protestant persuasion, and for three-quarters of the present century a Catholic could neither attain to a chair or to any degree of influence in it.
It was in the year 1845 that the movement began which was to triumph definitely in 1873, under the initiative of Mr. Gladstone. A certain Mr. Denis Caulfield Heron went up in that year for the competition for a fellowship, and took the first place. When he was, according to custom, invited to sign the Thirty-Nine Articles and to communicate in the University chapel, he opposed an absolute refusal, declaring himself to be a Roman Catholic; whereupon he was disqualified by the University Council. Mr. Heron exposed this judgment before the public, and succeeded in winning opinion to his side. But it proved an impossibility to make the Council recall their decision. The only thing Mr. Heron obtained, after a protracted struggle, was the creation of a new class of fellowships, accessible to Roman Catholics.
Finally, in 1873 the College authorities at last made up their minds to render the offices and emoluments of the University independent of any sectarian denomination; nevertheless the Anglican spirit remains alive within its precincts, and manifests itself in the clearest manner upon occasions.
Intellectual life is alive in Dublin, as many a learned or literary society, a flourishing review, four great daily and several weekly papers, can testify. The daily papers especially are edited with a spirit and humour truly characteristic. It is a well known fact that the Sister Isle contributes a third at least to the recruiting of the Anglo-Saxon press, not only in Great Britain, but in the United States, in Australia, and in the whole of the English speaking world. The Irishman a writer or a soldier born, as the Englishman is a born shopkeeper. The consequence is that the great papers in Dublin, the Freeman’s Journal, the Irish Times, United Ireland, the Express, the Evening Telegraph, are admirably edited each in its own line.
But the same thing can hardly be said of the illustrated and coloured sheets that accompany the weeklies, and which are placarded everywhere. Those prints, bearing upon the political topics of the day, may possess the merit of teaching the crowd the lesson to be drawn from events; but they are lamentably inefficient from an artistic point of view.
Ireland, decidedly, shines no more than does our own Brittany in the plastic arts. Her best painter has been Maclise, and he is by no means a great master. However, her coloured prints delight the hearts of the good people of Dublin. An old newspaper-seller, smoking her pipe at the corner of Leinster Street, holds her sides for very laughter as she contemplates the cartoon given this day by the Weekly News; it represents a mob of Orangemen in the act of pelting the Queen’s police with stones at Belfast. Underneath run the words: “Behold loyal Ulster!”
The quays of the Liffey are lined with book-shops like those of the Seine in Paris, to which they present a certain likeness. Following the quays from the west, one passes the building where sit the four Supreme Courts—Chancery, Exchequer, Queen’s Bench, and Common Pleas. The statues of Faith, Justice, Wisdom, and Piety rise under its Corinthian peristyle, which caused the typical Irish peasant, the Paddy of legend, to exclaim: